High quality video photography and digital video photography equipments are increasingly accessible to a broad range of businesses and individuals, from movie production studios to average consumers. Many of these equipments are not capable of recording wide angle video footages (i.e., panoramic video footages). Wide angle video footages are advantageous over normal angle video footages because they include more visual detail than normal video footages. However, those equipments that are capable of recording wide angle video footages are often very expensive. Thus, the recording of wide angle video footage is economically not practical for many users.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a practical and economical method for recording and/or producing wide angle video footages. Ideally, such a method can be performed by a video editing application that can align two or more video footages to produce a wide angle video footage, even when the two or more recorded video sequences were recorded at different positions, angles and/or have different movements. Ideally, such a method would provide a method that blends the recorded video footage into a seamless panoramic video footage (i.e., the boundaries that overlap each recorded video footage are not seen).
Furthermore, many of the video and digital video equipments have limited dynamic range when recording a video footage. In other words, many of today's video and digital video equipments have limited range when recording the contrast of scenes (i.e., range between the lightest highlight and darkest shadow in the scene). Therefore, these equipments do not record as much detail as those equipments with higher dynamic range. However, high dynamic range equipments cost substantially more than limited dynamic range equipments. Thus, there is need in the art for a practical method for increasing the dynamic range of recorded video sequences.